Today, corporate computing assets, such as laptops, phones, PDAs, etc., are utilized outside corporate firewalls more than ever before. With ever more employees either working from home or “on the road,” controlling and managing corporate information technology (IT) assets is becoming a difficult or serious problem. For instance, troubleshooting and repairing remote endpoints requiring manual, “hands on,” intervention are extremely costly to companies or IT departments. While a few technologies have emerged that facilitate diagnosis, and occasional remediation, the means of accomplishing this are not secure. As such, they risk security not only to the hardware and data files of the endpoint device, but also to the entire corporate enterprise as infected devices are brought behind and used inside the corporate firewall.
More particularly, some of the present technologies rely on either network communication (level 2 (MAC) or level 3 (IP)) to the endpoint, 802.1X authentication and information exchange, or some type of “pre-boot” Operating System. While minimally useful, the former is problematic for lack of having an IP stack up and functioning, while the latter only typically diagnoses hardware items, such as a bad drive, without any attendant capability to diagnose more rigorous or esoteric items such as non-complying computing policies, encryption functionality, VPN enforcement, or the like. Neither can certainly do it as a function of a particular location of the endpoint computing asset as the asset moves from location to location in a mobile environment. With the advent of virtual computing devices, such problems are only exacerbated since a single hardware platform will often guest many virtual computing devices, each with its own operating system (potentially vastly different from one another), drivers, interfaces, applications, etc.
Accordingly, a need exists in the art of evaluating endpoint computing assets for better diagnosis, especially for rigorous and esoteric matters. Also, such needs to occur securely. Even more, the need extends to virtual environments, each with many domains per a single hardware platform, and to mobile environments as assets move about during use. Naturally, any improvements should further contemplate good engineering practices, such as ease of implementation, unobtrusiveness, stability, etc.